The History on Tap blog is a great place to find resources that match Virginia’s SOLs for Social Studies and History, including games, foldables, presentations, study sheets, and more. It has resources for K-12, including tons of great things for VA Studies. It is updated and maintained by a Lisa Pennington, a Social Studies Specialist in Portsmouth, VA. If you teach social studies content, check it out!
As I sit here working on a project that requires some clipart, I’m reminded of my favorite FREE clipart site of all time for school projects. I’m not sure if you know about it already, but just in case you don’t, here it is:
You can find CUTE, elementary clipart for all subject areas, and even graphics that match the SOLs in a cute way. I love it!
Just in case you’ve never downloaded clipart from a website before, here’s how you do it:
Phillip Martin, the artist, also creates cute powerpoints based on school subjects. You might want to check them out while looking at his site.
(Phillip Martin allows you to use this clipart free for your classroom, newsletters, and other non-profit things…just as long as you do not add it to other clip art collections. Please honor his request when using these wonderful resources.)
Saturday be Talk Like a Pirate Day, so you might want t’ celebrate Friday or Monday with sprogs. Here’s some thin’s t’ get you started…
Links:
The Orginial Talk Like a Pirate Day Website
English to Pirate Translator (a must have for this important day)
Need some Pirate facts? Take a look at this wiki, ARR Pirates, created by Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Graders!
Pirate Challenge Geography Game (for the older sprogs)!
Want an easy back to school activity that will help you begin to know your students? Try Wordle! Here’s an example of an About Me activity using it. Please remember to use only first names if you do this with your students.
The instructional ideas for this resource are endless. You can find some of these ideas in this post, Wordle Word Clouds. I also suggest taking a look at the ideas Tom Barrett has collected from many other educators below:
Finally, you may want to check out Jen Wagner’s Guess the Wordle Wiki. There she posts different Wordles throughout the week, and students are encouraged to guess their subject using the words in the Wordle (Monday is an easy wordle, Wednesday is a little harder, Friday is the hardest). She will also be adding a Thursday Wordle that will be about a book (librarians, this might appeal to you)!
If you have your students create Wordles, make sure you direct them to this exact URL (http://www.wordle.net/create) so they bypass the gallery of other Wordles. While most of the examples in the gallery are usually okay, from time to time inappropriate words do appear there. By going straight to the “Create” area, you lessen the chance that students run across inappropriate words. :)
If you have never used Wordle before and would like some help as you explore it with your students, please contact me!
Following the our iGoogle Workshop, I’ve had a few requests for blogs to add to your iGoogle page. Here are a few I like to follow:
Technology in Elementary Classrooms:
Welcome to NCS-Tech
Instructional Technology Specialist
Artful, Tuneful, Beatful
Digital Passports
My Technology Journey
Primary Preoccupation
Tech Thoughts by Jen
Other ITRTs
(Pam Elgin) Technology Medley
(Meg Swecker) Giant Stride
(Brian McKee) Brians TRT Blog
I have many more of these if you want…
Gifted
(Amanda Gibson) The Gifted Corner
Smartboard Blogs:
Teachers Love Smartboards (probably my all-time favorite)
Talking SMARTBoards & Much More!
News:
BBC News in Pictures
CNN Top Stories
So Salem Blog
Roanoke Times
If you need help remembering how to add an RSS feed to your iGoogle Page, don’t forget to take a look at your iGoogle Handout.
If you find that you have a lot of blogs that you want to follow, it might be good to start using Google Reader. Will visit that topic soon! ;)
Feel free to comment and add some of your favorites!
In the technology world, and avatar is a representation of you (many times a cartoon). Many people use them instead of pictures of themselves in profiles because it adds a little anonymity. If you have students blogging or creating other online projects, you might want to have them create an avatar.
The Build Your Wild Self section of New York Zoos and Aquariums website is great site to use to make avatars and to learn about animals at the same time! Here’s my Wild Self!
After students create their “Wild Selves,” they can choose to save the picture to their computers. To do this, choose Get a Wild Desktop. Then right click on the picture and choose save! It’s that easy!
This post is mainly for teachers at East Salem. If you haven’t already switched from SchoolNotes to another service, we’d like you to try and make that switch as soon as possible. Here are some ideas and examples. Please let me know what you decide to do so I can make sure it’s linked with our school site!
Webpage example
Please email me and I can help you get set up quickly and easily!
Edublogs Example
Please let me know if you choose this so I can turn off the ads for you.
Classblogmeister Example
(Please email me for East Salem’s school code)
Update by sending an email and it appears on your web page like a blog.
Want to quickly make Jeopardy games to play with your class without the hassel of editing a bunch of templates? Check out this amazing new resource, Jeopardy Labs!
Here’s a sample game. Students click on the point amounts to view questions, and then keep score at the bottom of the board with the + and – signs. It will allow you to keep score for up to 10 teams!
Creating your own game is easy too. You just click in the Title and categories to edit, and click on the point amounts to add new questions. When you are finished creating a game, the site will give you a web address to your game. Hang on to it to find your game again!
This is hands down the BEST resource I’ve found to date to create your own Jeopardy game!
The Salem ITRTs are happy to announce our new web site located here:
http://salem.k12.va.us/itrt.
It’s far from complete, but please take a look at the Elementary section and then click on Links. Here you will find numerous links for your students to use in almost every subject. We will be adding to these throughout the year, so please let me know if there is a specific site you’d like to have added. Soon, this area of the site will replace the “Links for Kids” site we have been using.
The Teachers Corner will eventually have links especially for teachers. Support Materials include links to handouts that we have used in previous workshops as well as a few online tutorials. We hope to continue to add to these materials as time allows. Our ultimate goal is to provide a resource that you can use to enhance your use of technology in your instruction.
The Links pages are actually bringing in links from Delicious. You can check out our account here. If you click on one of the links pages and only see headers, you probably have an older version of Internet Explorer on your computer and we need to get you updated. You’ll be able to see the links though if you just refresh the page.
I hope you find this helpful!
Last year I promised to re-post this video on the 100th Day of School…so here it is!
Also, if you haven’t seen the 100th Day activities on the ITRT site, check them out here! If you are using IE 6, you may need to refresh the page once (we haven’t quite fixed that problem yet).
Wordle is a really fun, east web tool that turns words into art called “word clouds.” These word clouds emphasize words that are used more often in a piece of text. Wordle makes text clouds from text you enter, from blog RSS feeds, or from delicious tags. There are even options to change font color, type, and the design of the words.
Lots of people, including Pam Elgin, have been tossing around ideas for the use of Wordle in classrooms. Here’s a few you might want to try!
About Me
Have students type their name three times (this will make it bigger than other words). Then have them type words that mean something to them. This would be a great back to school activity.
Describe a Famous Person or a Literary Character
You could do the same activity, but with a famous person.
Adjective Collage
Create a collage of adjectives. In the Wordle Text box, type the noun you want to describe three times (this will make it appear bigger than the other words). Then list all the descriptive words you can think of to describe the noun. Here’s an example:
First Name Welcome
This idea is a great one from Pam. Create a Wordle with the first name of the students in your class to hang on your door. (Example by Kristin Kap)
Type in Spelling or Vocabulary Words
Use for student practice with spelling or as a way to introduce new words in a unit! Students will love making designs and changing font, color, and layout after they have finished typing in their spelling words.
Use as a Hook or a Visual Cue
Create a Wordle to introduce a new unit of student or to help give students a visual of a concept. Here’s one for question words:
Create a Funky Twist on an Acrostic or ABC Book
If you want the words to fall in somewhat ABC order, make sure to check “prefer alphabetical order” under layout.
Quickly Make a Funky Sign
Brainstorming on a Topic
(Music example by hbryson)
Book Review
Have student list all the words they can think of to describe a book or a chapter. Remember to have them type the important words more than once so they are bigger.
Vocabulary Words to Practice Reading
(Dolch Word List)
Letter Hunt (for Kindergarten)
You could do different versions with different fonts!
Pre-Reading Strategy
Show students the words from a poem or story and have them predict what it will be about. The Wordle below is from the poem Cannonball by David Crwwley.
Misuse of Common Words
Have students type in a story to see what words they use the most. Make sure they choose “Do Not Remove Common Words” under “Language” to see them all. Here’s an example from one of my summer school student’s blog (most used words include I, like, and):
And another in which the student started almost every sentence with “He.”
I could go on and on and on…I LOVE this tool! What kind of things can you think of?
Word of Caution: Be cautious about the Gallery. I’d recommend you NOT allow your students to browse through it….anyone can make a Wordle, and some are not as nice as others.
Update: Just learned something new, thanks to JBlack’s Awesome use of Wordle! You can keep words together in Wordle if you use a tilde (~) mark between words. So here’s another idea (and yes, I promise to stop now)!
Idioms
Create a Wordle with Idioms. To keep words together, put a ~ between each word in the idiom. (Spill~the~beans.) This may be a little tedious for younger kids, but shouldn’t be too hard for older ones!
A group of technology educators on Twitter have been passing around this great site for Early Readers on the Smartboard. It’s called LookyBook, and it presents picture books in a format that you can use on the Smartboard (or any computer, really). Here’s an thumbnail example I felt was appropriate for this time of year. Click on the book once to turn pages and twice to see the larger version on the Lookbook Website.
Using the Smartboard, you can present a picture book in a way that all children can see it easily (or allow them to present it), AND you can WRITE on the book. Cirlce rhyming words, highlight descriptive words, pick out punctuation…all using the Smartboard pens. *The writing in a few of the books is pretty small, so you’ll have to check them out first to see if this will work.*
Another neat feature is that the site will allow you to customize your own virtual bookshelf where you can store your favorite stories. Currently there are over 300 books to choose from, but more are being added every day.
Very simple explanation of my job!
This comes from the 60 Sec Tech site. It has great, short video tutorials on technology, especially the Smartboard!
I finished “A Whole New Mind” a month or so ago, and am still going through many of the resources Daniel Pink included in the book. One resource is called StoryCorps, and it’s located in the chapter where Pink describes Story as one of the six high-concept, high-touch senses needed in the Conceptual Age.
Storycorps in a non-profit organization that specializes in stories…yours, mine, people we love. It records stories in booths all over the United States, and even sends out traveling kits for you to record individual stories. You can listen to some of them in itunes or on their website. What a super idea! In looking at the site, it appears they are going to be in our area next fall…Sept. 25-Oct. 18, 2008 at the WVTF radio station. I’ll have to keep a lookout for more info!
The process of recording a story of a loved one reminds me of something I did in college…a journal for my parents with questions about their lives. I didn’t have much money one Christmas while I was in college, so I bought two blank journals: one for Dad and one for Mom. At the top of each page I wrote questions like
I put a note in the front of the journal asking them to write the answers and give it back to me the following Christmas. They did give them back to me the next Christmas, full of stories. I can honestly say those two journals are my most treasured possessions, especially now that my mom has passed away.
So, what’s your story? What are your parents’ stories? We all have them, no matter our age. Even our students have stories! Wouldn’t be neat to have students record their own stories, or even stories of their loved ones? It could be a writing assignment, but also a lesson in learning to tell a story. I do have 4 or 5 portable mp3 recorders you can use if you are interested in doing this!
